Well just recently, the standards body which controls the DRM for Blu-Ray approved managed copy, which would let you legally rip the movie to your hard disk.

But it would be up to the individual studios how to price those copies. It’s more of an enthusiast feature though and probably would result in more pricey players.

For the mass market, it would make more sense to drive down the price of players and discs, which are still too pricey.

But I’ve learned that if you can ignore the hype, it’s better to wait to buy discs. Last year, I got the Dark Knight and Wall-E at release. Still haven’t gotten around to watching them. Well now, I could save about $5-10 each.

Digital distribution will not match the quality of Blu-Ray for a long time, if ever. Instead, it would be a convenience thing and the mass market is willing to give up quality for convenience, as the progression from CDs to MP3 has shown.

And pricing will never undercut package media by enough to make the loss in quality worth the tradeoff. Because the studios aren’t going to give up margins for higher volume. Just as the record companies still charge the same or more on iTunes, even when bittorrent is their competition, movies for download will always be priced as if they’re on media with packaging and distribution costs.

Which is ridiculous, because not only do they not have the same manufacturing and distribution/inventory costs, for the consumer, there’s no way to sell or trade used digital downloads the way they can discs or other physical media.

What I don’t get are individuals touting digital downloads over media, unless they have a vested interest in the downloads business somehow.